So, the proverbial s**t has hit the fan, and everyone is lapping it up with relish. But this write up is not about Jensen Huang per se, but about how the AI/tech billionaires of this world have developed a massive disconnect from the lives of most people on the planet. This means mainly low- to middle-income wage earners who created the wealth that allowed this super-rich club to live with their heads above the clouds.
Huang’s Nvidia company has been leading the charge on AI’s development from the hardware side, forging chips that train its Large Language Models (LLMs) models at blizzard speed. The company used to make Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) for PCs, and the move to expand into AI chips has been very profitable for Nvidia, with its valuation rising exponentially to $5.3 trillion.
Unfortunately for this AI Rockstar, success went into his head as well, making him dip his wick in all the wrong places much like his bandmates Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Eric Schmidt. “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac,” as former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger once said, and economic power is certainly foundational to that concept.
But this commentary is not about sexual misbehavior, but social morality. While their human failings are similar, Huang’s attitude on AI is what makes him stand out. Despite some of its biggest architects (Musk, Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Geoffrey Hinton) cautioning governments about the potential dangers of unregulated AI development, Huang has been doing the opposite. He is dismissive of these expressions of concern as “doomsday scenarios,” and is certainly not worried about AI’s potential for rendering millions of workers unemployed.
Huang’s lack of concern for workers’ welfare finds resonance with those of other tech billionaires, especially Musk, Bezos and Gates whose companies have been notorious for large-scale workforce reductions over the past five years. Nvidia has better employee retention practices compared to Tesla, Amazon or Microsoft, but Huang also severely exploits Nvidia’s workers by making them toil longer hours and 7-day weeks, with a dismal work-life balance focused on urgent deliverables.
And here lies the rub: people are criticizing this leather-jacketed, American Dream poster boy for all the wrong reasons. His repeated failure to remain faithful to his wife is not nearly as immoral as his massive exploitation of Nvidia workers, or his lack of concern for AI’s potentially harmful effects. His avowed admiration for the American model of wealth creation has rendered him blind to community values that are every bit as important as financial success. He is just out for more super-profits by riding the wave of speculative capital around AI, while disregarding the future of the very people who have made him rich.
Huang’s tripping on his own hubris and being removed as CEO will not even put a stop to Nvidia’s full-throttle advance into backstopping AI’s LLMs. His moral integrity might have been sullied, but the core values he embedded in the company remains unchanged. One can only hope that the AI funding bubble will burst or be degraded at some point, enabling its responsible development and usage to come to the fore in place of its speculative, superprofit-grabbing impetus.